Rumor claims, everyone denies EPA power is on the block

I hope that the denials are true. The White House would be much better off giving them the whole $61 billion in cuts, or more, than capitulating to policy riders, and giving up what little power they have to combat global warming is the last policy rider to capitulate to.

Budget Agreement Near

I always figured that it would be at least half of what the Republicans want and would be free of the ideological defunding measures that the right wing wants. The problem is that there are numerous Republican congressman who are fanatics in one way or another (beyond the subject of taxes, where pretty much all Republicans are irrational fanatics, or pretend to be) and many are new and haven't gotten the memo that "deficits don't matter." And no, that idea isn't dead. It's just dormant until the next Republican president wants to cut taxes, create new departments, expand programs, and launch wars. Which is to say, until the next Republican president takes office.

Bradley Manning isn't the only American in solitary confinement

This article brings to light the overuse of solitary confinement in the United States.

Clearly there are cases where the prisoner is so incorrigibly violent that your only choices are to lock them up in solitary confinement, subject them to summary execution, or let them try to rape, murder, and torture their guards and fellow prisoners until one of those kills the prisoner in self-defense. Of those options, the first seems like the least bad.

I just tested out the new New York Times paywall

You can reset your count by clearing out the nytimes.com cookies. Really. You can clear those cookies in 15-20 seconds tops in Firefox. They supposedly spent millions to erect this thing? I'd heard that was the case, but couldn't believe it. Good grief.

Still, I'm not sure how they'd do it otherwise. Keeping track of how many articles you've viewed serverside would probably have to involve going by IP address, and they'd end up getting tons and tons of false positives that way (especially in office buildings and other institutions where they'd be most likely to get paying customers; they aren't going to piss those people off). De facto nagware might be the best they could come up with.

Update: If you set up a cookie exception for nytimes.com that only allows cookies for the current session, then the 20 articles will reset automatically with each restart of your browser. That way, most people will really never see the paywall, unless they change it of course.

Are they trying to make piracy guilt-free?

They could hardly be doing a better job. On this side of the Atlantic, the RIAA is suing LimeWire for $75 trillion dollars. That's more than five times the national debt of the United States of America (quick, Congress: slap a hefty tax on ridiculous copyright lawsuit awards and settlements and we can pay off the entire debt at once). It's also probably far, far more than the sum total revenues, not just profits, of the record industry since it's inception. On the other side of the pond, the Belgian equivalent is trying to make truck drivers pay to be allowed to listen to the fricken radio in their trucks.

Ezra Klein suggests we start really paying for war

Not a bad idea, with one proviso: we don't need to pay for the whole war with taxes and spending cuts. Big wars in the past required borrowing. The same purpose, keeping us out of wars that aren't worth a few bucks more being withheld every paycheck to us, would be served if we had to pay for a substantial amount of the cost of the war in new taxes or spending cuts.

Paul Thurrott on Firefox 4

It's not a bad write-up, though Thurrott still is a Chrome+IE9 (naturally) guy. I just don't get why the tech crowd is so into Chrome. Beyond some under the hood stuff (like a separate instance for each tab and installing extensions without restarting), speed is the only thing it has on Firefox 4 and Thurrott himself said the speed difference on modern browsers isn't dramatic. Firefox 4's interface is heavily Chrome-inspired (see this post in order to de-Chrome it). Okay, it lacks the ability to create standalone applications, but unlike Thurrott I much prefer pin-tabs anyway (a feature first available in the Chrome Browser, not just ChromeOS, which Firefox improved on by making links outside the pinned website's domain open in new windows--I love that since it makes the pinned website stickier). If you really want standalone apps, get Prism.

Here's what Firefox has that Chrome doesn't:

• A modern bookmarking system. Chrome's is pre-Netscape 4.0x and pre-IE5. In other words, it's a 20th century bookmarking system in 2011.


• A good history interface, including the ability to reopen recently closed tabs. I use this all the time (Chrome has that, at least you can reopen the last closed tab by either right-clicking the tab bar or doing Ctrl-Shift-Tab; you can keep doing it to open previous closed tabs in order of closure). Also, you can access your history without having to open a separate window/tab which is really nice. You can also search and delete items at the same time, something Chrome won't let you do.


• A full-screen mode that includes a compact hideaway tab and navigation bar. Finally they got rid of the grey line at the top when it's hidden so you have the best of both worlds: real fullscreen and full browser functionality when you need it. And with the bookmark sidebar you get access to your bookmarks when you need them with a simply Ctrl-b without having to leave fullscreen.


• A larger and richer extension ecosystem. Many people say this bogs down the browser because people have too many extensions. I say: use a little self-control and only keep the ones you really need active. Of course this would be a lot easier if, like Chrome, Firefox allowed extensions to be turned on and off without restarting.


• Mouse Gestures that don't screw up the right mouse button in OSX and Linux. Not an issue for the Windows-using majority, though.


• Customizability. My Firefox 4 is much different in appearance than the standard. restored the menu bar, added back the RSS icon in the address bar, restored the status bar, and removed the status bar-like functionality from the address bar. My Firefox basically looks like the old Firefox 3.6 with tabs on top and the new theme. This isn't something you can really do in Chrome. Paul Thurrott does list this as an advantage of Firefox.

As for the lack of search functionality in the location bar, I've used Smart Keywords on Firefox for years to search from the location bar. Actually, I used pretty much the same feature on IE4 (via QuickSearch.exe from IE PowerToys) way back when and missed it when I moved to Linux until I'd discovered that it had been implemented in Mozilla's browser (no doubt it had been there for a long time without my knowing about it).

Maybe it's the task manager. I have to admit that does make me drool (no, not literally).

Paywall Whack-a-Mole

Now this is a surprise: lots of folks are trying many different ways to defeat the paywall. The New York Times is just going to have to accept that. Shutting down Twitter accounts for dubious trademark violations won't solve the problem. As long as they allow unlimited Twitter linkthroughs, they will have people providing firehoses one way or another. Tweeting all their stuff themselves only makes it ludicrously easy. Heck, just import this OPML file into Google Reader and you're set. At least until they either stop Tweeting or revise their social media linking policy.

Firefox 4 is finally released

I've been using it for quite some time, but it's good to see it finally out there officially. Maybe now Firefox can staunch the bleeding of users into Chrome-land. The way I see it, Chrome now only has the advantage in the areas of performance (which isn't as dramatic as before) and the way processes and extensions are handles (e.g., not having to restart when you enable or disable an extension). Everything else is Firefox's advantage, some things dramatically so (Chrome's bookmarking interface is still pre-IE5/Netscape4, i.e., 12-13 years out of date).

Shocker: New York Times tries to shutter @FreeNYT

They're taking the curious tack of claiming Trademark violation. What happens when an identical account is opened, possibly by the same guy, under a handle that doesn't include NYT in it?

The New York Times paywall is porous enough...

The New York Times paywall is porous enough that with only a little bit of effort you'll still be able to get whatever you want for free. It's still a pain, though. From the FAQ:

12. Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, search engines or my blog?

Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you've already read your 20 free articles.

When you visit NYTimes.com by clicking links in search results, you'll have a daily limit of 5 free articles. This limit applies to the majority of search engines.

This means that there are search engines that will work for unlimited click-throughs or you can just search Twitter for the content you want. Now if only someone could whip up a Firefox extension to do all that automatically...

Update: Now we finally see how @FreeNYT works: the owner merely created a Twitter List aggregating the various official NYT feeds into the FreeNYT Firehose. Unless they shut down those Twitter accounts, I don't see how they block it since it is using their own tweets.

Howard Kurtz on the NYT Paywall

Overall a pretty good piece, but I don't get his repeated emphasis on the affluence of the New York Times subscriber base and how that could make the paywall work. Aren't the affluent New York Times readers already likely to be print subscribers? That would mean that they won't be affected by the paywall at all.

Details of New York Times paywall announced

$15 per month. Ugh. There's no way in hell I'm going to subscribe, yet I'm sure I'll bump into the 20 article a month limit. I expect them to lose a lot of traffic, and ad revenue, from this move.

If they want to do this right, they need to something more along the lines of 60 or 90 articles a month free. That way all the casual readers who might click on a couple articles every day in their RSS feed would be okay, but people who really read the paper would have to pay.

They will, like the Wall Street Journal, allow Google News clicks through to the article in question. They are capping it at five a day, though. Interestingly, they are also letting Facebook and Twitter links through and don't seem to be capping those. Someone has already created the @FreeNYT Twitter account which promises to tweet everything on the Times website. How much you want to bet they figure out a way to block those and only those Twitter links.

A thought just occurred to me: how are they going to let Twitter links pass through when virtually all Twitter links go through an intermediary URL shortening service? Would all such services work, or would only nyti.ms (and presumably other bit.ly links) work?

Andrew Sullivan goes apoplectic about the No Fly Zone

Here, here and here. He writes as if a full-scale invasion and occupation a la Iraq is already a done deal. I suspect this is where his 2012 repositioning will begin in earnest (which has been coming for a while, and is supported by his record of never supporting the same presidential candidate twice). It will be interesting to see how he can justify supporting whoever the GOP nominee is given all he's written (unless, of course, it's Palin, in which case he'd either have to support Obama again or move back to England considering what he's written about her since she was picked by McCain for VP).

As for Libya, my gut feeling is it won't turn into a full-scale ground war. It certainly won't be another Iraq.

Will California really vote to pass Gov. Brown's tax extensions?

Assuming the Republicans don't block putting it on the ballot. People very rarely vote to raise their own taxes, even when they understand the need for additional revenue and are willing to re-elect politicians who raise taxes. That's one of the reasons that direct democracy is a bad idea (even in political communities not overrun by anti-tax fanaticism). Actually those two words, "direct democracy," sum up most of California's crushing political dysfunction. I'm not even mainly thinking about all the money the people appropriate via initiative without having to worry about how it's going to be paid for. The biggest problem is Proposition 13, which requires a 2/3 supermajority of both houses to pass a budget or tax increases.

I suspect that also contributes to California's very static legislature (though Gerrymandering no doubt contributes heavily). If Republicans were truly impotent in their permanent minority status, they'd likely move to the center to have a shot at gaining power in a liberal state.

No government shutdown for now

Over the objections of the batshit crazy wing of the party, that really really wanted a government shutdown as evidenced by the poison pill they tried to put into the stopgap spending measure (defunding ObamaCare, for starters; there's no way in hell the Democrats would agree to that. They might have just as well said they opposed another stopgap measure period).

Shocker: Lawmaker's Cell Phone Numbers Private

So says the AP. What use would they be if they weren't private? Cell phones don't exactly lend themselves to having secretaries answer calls, and if even semi-important politicians had to answer every call from a constituent themselves they'd literally never do anything else. Or more to the point, they'd turn off their cell phones, stick them in a drawer somewhere and never take them out again.

The idea of making politicians' cell phone numbers public is ludicrous for that reason. Making the call logs a matter of public record is more logical, but it would do no good: they could just have a staffer or family member get them a Tracfone at the local supermarket and use that to make any calls they don't want people to know about.

Drag and Drop: the reason I will never use KDE

See this thread. For some bizarre reason, KDE has always taken the stance that it is somehow to the benefit of the user to harass them with a popup menu each and every time they try to drag and drop a file and provide no way to change that behavior (short of creating your own fork of KDE). That is insane. The KDE fans that, as in the linked thread, defend the practice always struck me as classic Stockholm Syndrome sufferers (see especially the lame argument about Windows supposedly being "unpredictable"; it would take a skilled user, which Linux users are almost by definition, less than a week to get down pat what Windows is going to do when you drag and drop in each type of situation without paying much attention. An unskilled user might take a month. Big deal). As one of the sane commenters points out:

Here are the facts:

• Windows Explorer, Mac OS X Finder, Linux Gnome, Linux LXDE, Linux Fluxbox, and Haiku Tracker default to move when files are dragged and dropped. They do not ask for confirmation.


• Thunar defaults to copy.


• Dolphin asks the user.


• Users very frequently move files into folders.


• Users hardly ever copy files into folders.

There is only one sane option:

Set the default to move and do not ask the user for confirmation.

Fortunately, there is such a thing as GNOME.

Will the Cameron Government in the UK collapse?

Major cracks are starting to appear in the coalition as the rank and file of the Liberal Democratic Party rebel against the leadership over healthcare. As an American with a casual interest in British politics, I suspected something like this would happen. I got the impression, rightly or wrongly, from newspapers that the leadership of the Lib-Dems is from the more conservative wing of the party. Beyond that, the rank and file aren't the ones living the impossible dream of actually sitting in cabinet--something Clegg and co. probably never expected would happen considering that the Lib-Dems never had a snowball's chance in hell of winning a general election. The leadership, therefore, are much more likely to support whatever the Tories propose than the the rank and file.

Wikileaks is irresponsible

After the last post, I feel the need to flesh out my overall position on Wikileaks. While I think that our government and many in the punditocracy are overreacting, I do think that Wikileaks' carpet bombing approach to exposing government secrets is irresponsible. It releases mountains of classified data, most of which has little to no public interest (and is extremely boring) and some of which has put lives in danger (which isn't to say that some of it isn't within the world's right to know: that the Saudi's have been lying about their oil reserves has consequences for the entire world). This flies in the face of the cost-benefit analysis that has traditionally gone into publishing state secrets.

Worse than that: it makes the environment more hostile for leaks in the future. Journalists and leakers are free to publish not just because the courts protect free speech, but because the overall climate allows it. Traditionally, leaks against an administration could depend on support from the opposition, or at least on the opposition saying the harm to freedom of speech and of information incurred by going after the leakers was greater than the benefit of plugging the hole. Wikileaks has taken leaking to such an anarchistic extreme that the whole political establishment is turned against it. If Julian Assange does eventually end up in the US charged with something, it will be a chilling precedent. This is also significant as far as the courts are concerned: judges are not immune to public opinion and public passions. Why do you think they tread on eggshells when National Security is at stake?

Don't get me wrong: leaking classified information, even if it is against our national security interests, can absolutely be justified. The people who leaked the details of Bush's Official Torture Program "Enhanced Interrogation Program" are heroes as far as I'm concerned. That is something that the American people had a right, and a duty, to know. So did the rest of the world. Publishing the kitchen sink just because you can is another matter entirely.

State department spokesman unofficial says what I've been thinking

WaPo:

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has called the treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley E. Manning, an Army private whom military jailers forced to sleep naked for several days last week, "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."

As I said on Matthew Yglesias' Megan McArdle's blog:

Absolutely right. The only thing surprising about this is that it happened in such a high-profile case. You'd think some political pressure would have been brought to bear to ensure that nothing like this would happen since it would inevitably show up in the papers worldwide (which it is, even if it was a bit slow in starting).

Obama's official response is disappointing, but thoroughly predictable. There's no way in hell he's politically stupid enough to show even basic human sympathy for Bradley Manning the uber-leaker. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there's some backchannel chewing out going on about now. It is an international embarrassment and what's more it put Obama in the position of alienating either the portion of the general public, who tend not to give a damn what happens to people who cross the bright line between Good People and Bad People, and the significant part of his base that's very concerned about torture¹ and human rights (as practiced and observed, or not, by the U.S. Government and not just third world countries and China)². He can't be happy about that.

As Talleyrand said, “This is worse than a crime, it's a blunder.”

¹Although I would not use the word torture to describe this. The incident in question is where the word "degrading treatment" seems right on the money.

²This includes me, though I don't think I'd describe myself as being part of Obama's base.

Mozilla Archive Format add-on rocks

I've long wished that Firefox would get compatibility with Microsoft's longstanding MHT format for saving complete webpages as single files. Not only does this extension do that, it also provides an open version that basically works by zipping up the product of the it's own version of the standard Save Webpage Complete feature of Firefox (though you can, as an option, make it use the browser's own version of said feature if you want to, or the Save Complete extension's). This makes the resulting files readable by anyone: all you have to do is unzip them and then open the html page inside like normal. The extension also has a useful conversion utility that will seek out all your Firefox webpage complete saves and turn them into .maff archives.

The only downside in Linux is that Gnome thinks that the resulting .maff file is a zipfile and tries to open it as such. I worked around this by adding Firefox as an option for opening zip files. It would be better if they could find a way to produce zip files that look like a distinct file format in Unix environments like OpenOffice does so you could cleanly associate the file format with Firefox. Still, it's a great extension. BTW, be sure to get the 1.0.0 preview version if you're using Firefox 4.

Update: It is possible to differentiate .maff files from .zip files in Gnome/Linux. This mailing list post has everything you need to know to figure it out. I might post detailed step-by-step instructions later.

WordPress.org getting WordPress.com features

through Jetpack. Nothing there looks too compelling to me, but it's nice to see anyway. Not to mention that there's more to come.

Color me skeptical

Are some of the most conservative Republican Senators really considering tax increases as part of an overall deficit-reduction package? I'll believe it when I see it. My guess is that it will either a) be limited to eliminating tax credits that are really social spending in disguise or b) "on the table" is merely a theoretical term to them and there's no chance they'll ever do it. If anything can be said about the GOP since Bush I raised taxes, it's that they are so fanatically anti-tax that they'd practically rather see the country burn than raise a single tax on a single billionaire. Nor do I think that either they or the Democrats will seriously overhaul Social Security and Medicare. The GOP is counting on the votes of senior citizens and the Democrats cannot afford to look weaker on protecting the vulnerable than the GOP. Likewise Defense is off the table; in a time of (eternal) war, neither side is going to be willing to seriously cut spending there. True, they could come together like mature adults and take the hit together for the country, but there's not a snowball's chance in hell that will ever happen. Not unless the country really does start burning, and probably not even then. The result of no new taxes and over half the budget (Defense, Medicare, Social Security) off limits: massive deficits as far as the eye can see.

I think I know why John Kerry lost

He habitually instills the sense with his statements that he's taking a long, long time to say almost nothing. Case in point: his statement on Bradley Manning's treatment in prison:

There are concerns about what is happening, but a strong argument is being made that they're trying to preserve his safety, they don't want him harming himself, and using his own clothing to hang himself, or do something like that," he said. "That's happened in prison before. I think it is possible to protect him, I think, and there are some legitimate reasons to believe that that may be true also. But I think that a lot of people are now reviewing this very, very closely, people have weighed in, myself included, I think that analyses are being made. There was a big article in the newspapers today examining it. And I'm convinced that there will be real scrutiny with respect to that issue.

YouTube Commenting: Epic Fail

Problem #1: They don't allow urls in the comments.

Problem #2: When you try to put one in, the comment fails and they don't tell you why. It's up to you to figure out that it wasn't a temporary error and dig through their help files to figure out what the problem is.

Apple trying to get multiple downloads

Not being able to download a file more than once isn't too big a deal if you're responsible about backups, at least if we're talking unDRMed media (putting a download-once limit on DRMed stuff is just obnoxious), but this would still be nice for iTunes users. The reason, though, that Apple is doing this is that it is really necessary for their vision of a post-PC future. Presently the need to backup makes the use of the PC a practical necessity. If they could institute some combination of cloud-based backups and multiple downloads, the PC could eventually be totally eliminated. I'm not saying I welcome this--actually, the prospect of a post-PC world run by Apple of all people terrifies me considering how restrictive they are--but it does make sense.

I love Disqus

I really like having all my comments on various sites in one place. It makes following discussions really easy. I have added Disqus comments on this blog as well, not that I get much in the way of commenters at this time. As a webmaster I particularly love the Twitter and Facebook integration, making it easy for anyone to comment without having to allow unregistered commenters (which I currently do since this blog has such minute traffic).

Wordpress.com leaves much to be desired

It's mystifying that the service is so popular considering that it is ridiculously locked-down* and upsells you on things that Blogger gives for free. No user-specified JavaScript, even in sidebar widgets (which means no Sitemeter, no Disqus, etc.), no editing templates, and of course no plugins. To edit CSS, you need to pay them $14.97 a year. To add a custom domain, you need to pay them $12 per year if you have the domain registered somewhere else and $17. If you want no ads on your blog, you need to pay them a whopping $29.97 a year. All of which come standard in Blogger; the ability to edit CSS has been there since at least 2003 (or was it 2004) when I started my first blog and the lack of ads has been there since shortly after Google bought them. And they've always let you add ads, something that Wordpress.com won't do no matter what you pay them (assuming you don't have a special elite account not available to the public).

Best to either use Blogger or do what I did and get a cheap webhosting account and run real Wordpress with fully editable themes, the ability to install new themes yourself, the ability to add JavaScript anywhere, and the ability to add plugins galore. The ability to install new themes is particularly important considering that Wordpress themes in general either a) suck or b) are appropriate only in very specific purposes. Finding a good general Wordpress theme is like looking for a diamond in the rough. The 106 free themes they allow you simply doesn't cut it.

*Speaking of locked down, way back when it first started I began the process of migrating to Wordpress.com from Blogger. I found a 3-column theme I liked, I think it was one of the Andreas ones, but the way the items were displayed on the left sidebar didn't match the way they were displayed on the right sidebar. I discovered a hack using a text-box that allowed me to make them match. Within an hour or two (!) the theme was altered so that my hack didn't work. Because of the timing, I believed, and still believe, that they saw what I did and changed the theme just to break my simple display hack. I immediately gave up my migration plans. That is a level of control-freakery I won't put up with.

Update: That last paragraph was written from memory. I have since managed to dig up a contemporaneous post I wrote on my Blogger blog (which is long since gone, as is the account it was on: thank you Internet Archive!). The post is copied below the fold:

New PC Demand in a slump

Tablets get the blame. I can understand tablets being the cause of not buying a second or a third laptop for the household, but delaying replacement of laptops strikes me as more likely to be a result of software not catching up with hardware development. What, exactly, is a three-year old laptop not going to be able to do for you? Hardcore gaming and serious video editing (even the iPad can now do casual video editing)? Those aren't things one generally does on a laptop to begin with (and the sort of people who buy $3000 laptops to do that probably are still swapping them out on schedule).

Government Shutdown Delayed

Agreeing to the two-week version of the Republican budget either means  one of two things: either that the Democrats are scared that a government shutdown will burn them or that they think a shutdown is inevitable and want to start by capitulating to the IMO unreasonable demand that a very short-term continuing resolution be a miniature version of their deviation from the status quo in order that they come out looking like the reasonable party when the shutdown happens. Of course this is all the Democrats fault for failing to pass a real budget in an election year and leaving it to the next, divided congress to handle it.

Well, I guess if the fight weren't about this it would be about the debt ceiling. That is Obama's fault. It makes no sense to approve the extension of the Bush tax cuts, thus denying the government more revenue that it would get automatically, without also getting an increase in the debt ceiling as well.